Progress comes at a cost

At this very moment there is a team of highly skilled professionals who are out of sight and largely out of mind, yet they have been tasked with solving an almost unimaginably difficult puzzle. They work for the NTSB and their charge is to figure out exactly what went wrong last week aboard SpaceShipTwo, the private sector launch system being developed by Virgin Galactic, Scaled Composites, and a collection of truly gifted engineers, technologists, craftsmen, and pilots.

As you may recall, SpaceShipTwo came apart during a test flight, killing one test pilot and injuring another.

After achieving one jubilant success after another, the testing crews have experienced the wrenching drama that has been so much a part of the life and work of pioneers through the ages. A fatal accident happened. It happened to them, not somebody else. They didn’t read about it in the papers, they experienced the pain and suffering of the loss personally.

Tragedy is unfortunately a part of this business. It always has been. It always will be.

Historically we hear pleas at a time like this for a finding, the discovery of some specific piece of information that will allow us to prevent this from ever happening again.

Unfortunately, “this” means different things to different people.

To those in the field, “this” is a literal term indicating the exact circumstance that occurred. “This” means the failure that led to a fatality.

To the layman “this” might very well represent the idea of a fatal accident, not the cause of the accident. And that misunderstanding can create an impediment to progress as people with minimal understanding of the project begin to insist on a 100% safe program for the future.

Safe is a word that is often abused in our culture. Not because safety is an unworthy goal. It is very worthy.

Anyone with children strives for safety in their day-to-day lives. But anyone with children also knows that complete safety is unattainable.

Test pilots know it too. The history of their profession indicates a great irony of life. To do the work required to achieve a reasonable level of safety for a new technology, accidents will occur. Some of those accidents will result in injury or death. No reasonable person is happy about that.

Test crews set the bar high, work hard to maintain a high level of safety even as they work to move the project forward. But they’re delving into new areas of performance. They’re pioneers going where nobody has gone before. And sometimes their planning, their assumptions, and their testing proves to be inadequate.

Bad things happen to good people. That has always been true. It continues to be true today and will continue to be true for as long as humans walk the earth or fly above it.

The Wright brothers weren’t just the first to fly a heavier than air machine, they were also the first to suffer a crash that killed a passenger. Lindbergh successfully crossed the Atlantic on his non-stop flight from New York to Paris, but half a dozen men were killed in pursuit of that goal before he launched from Roosevelt Field. The jet age brought a comfortable shirt-sleeve environment to trans-oceanic turbine powered passenger flights, but two De Havilland Comets broke up in flight in the early 1950s, killing all aboard. The U.S. lost astronauts on the ground and in flight as the space program developed, as did the Soviet Union, losing multiple cosmonauts along the way.

Even knowing all this, we persist in our efforts to expand our knowledge, advance technology, and reach for answers that will lead us into a future that provides an enhanced version of today.

Risk is inherent to progress, just as it is inherent to stagnation. Because life involves risk no matter what you do — or don’t do.

The difference for the aviation minded is that we accept that risk. We do our very best to mitigate it, to improve on what we know and upgrade our skills and equipment over time. But we know the truth: There will be accidents. The unforeseen and unimagined will occasionally rise up and cause harm to those who push the boundaries of what humans can do.

All progress comes at a cost. Sometimes that cost is quite high. But this particular tragedy brings to mind a tragedy of my youth.

I was in the fifth grade when the Apollo 1 fire happened. The day afterward, my teacher took the bulk of our school day to talk to my class about what had happened. She talked about the space program and what it meant for the future of mankind. She talked about the kind of men who rode the elevator up to the Apollo capsule, climbed inside, and prepared themselves for a flight into outer space. She even reminded us of the untold thousands who were working on the project but would never see the inside of a space capsule. The message she shared with my peers and me remains as valid today as it did then. I’m fortunate to have been there to hear it first-hand.

The people who do this work know it is dangerous. They don’t revel in that knowledge. Rather, they put their best efforts into making the impossible possible, to transform the incredibly risky into the reasonably safe. To move mankind into the future one technological baby step at a time. They’re doing their best to create a better, brighter, more rewarding life for the rest of us.

And sometimes bad things happen to them as a result. Progress comes at a cost.

Let’s celebrate the men and women who line up to do that work, those who are willing to pay the price in order to drag the rest of us into the future right along with them. Let’s remember the fallen, respect their work, and move into the future knowing just a little bit more than we did before — thanks to them and their hard work.

Comments

Regardless of what reportedly happened, the authors text still stands as a truth (as I see it anyway). Being a test pilot crew means not only testing new equipment but the methodology of using the untried or modified equipment. There will always be risk.

Regardless of what the primary cause of the accident was, mechanical, procedure, or not following procedure,Those who push the boundaries of technology understand the risks. To quickly place blame is not something that those in test flight do. One of those Apollo 1 astronauts was infamous in the press for having “lost” his Mercury capsule, Liberty Bell 7. The story at the time was that he had “blown” the hatch,the recovered capsule in 1999 showed no sign of it being triggered from inside. Some times things “just happen”, engineers don’t believe it but they do. Many of those involved with experimental test flight would still agree with this quote from Gus Grissom from 1969, “If we die we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life. Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves because in the final analysis, only man can fully evaluate the moon in terms understandable to other men.” –Astronaut Gus Grissom Apollo 1

Apollo 1, the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle accidents were caused not by crew error in operating the equipment but by management error which ultimately can be traced to politics. As much as we like to assume that our Lunar Space Program was about exploration and pioneering in space, it wasn’t. It was motivated entirely by politics and nothing else. It was a race to beat the Russians to the moon. Oh sure, the politicians including Kennedy were quick to use flowery sounding hyperbole about exploration of space, etc. but that was for public consumption to lull us into believing the expenditure was worth it all.

Grissom and his crew (White and Chaffee) knew that they were dealing with an inferior and dangerous North American Apollo Command Module and Grissom was urged by his fellow astronauts to bring it to the attention of upper management but he declined stating that he was afraid they would replace him if he did. That was a costly error in judgement on his part. Sadly and ironically he was replaced.

Launching Challenger against the advice of Marshall Space Flight Center Engineers of Huntsville AL was another tragic and costly error in judgement. Then Columbia was brought down knowing that it had been smacked by a large chunk of insulation from the main tank during launch that could have damaged the critical heat shield. Rather than dock it to the the ISS where it could have been examined more closely the management decision was made to bring it down because other chunks of insulation had been seen presumably hitting the wing area with its critical heat sheild during previous launches with no visible damage noted during postflight inspection. The old siren song of a positive bias sucked them into a fatal trap.

Every one of the 160 odd space flights flown by NASA were test flights. None could be considered routine. The Lunar flights were all given a 50-50 chance of success particularly Apollo 11, the first to land on the moon. This effort by Virgin Galactic et. al. needs to accept that level of risk as well as the big spenders who have booked passage at a quarter mil per ticket cost. This accident has likely cooled their passion considerably.

Just wanted to comment on whether the space program expenditures were “worth it”. Even at its peak, the Apollo program was a mere 4% of the federal budget. Currently it represents about 1/2 of a one percent of the federal budget. The current NASA budget amounts to less than half of what American spend going to movies. It is about the same as Americans spend on Fantasy Football every year. There are many other examples. A 1971 analysis of NASA expenditures by MRIGlobal concluded that “the $25 billion in 1958 dollars spent on civilian space R & D during the 1958-1969 period has returned $52 billion through 1971 — and will continue to produce pay offs through 1987, at which time the total pay off will have been $181 billion. The discounted rate of return for this investment will have been 33 percent.” That’s a pretty good return on our investment.

Too bad the author didn’t wait another day or two before putting so much work into this high fallutin’ piece. As most everyone now knows, the copilot reportedly unlocked a tailboom “feathering” feature designed to create drag during the descent profile too early. The tailboom then made certain uncommanded movements which (apparently) resulted in a catastrophic inflight structural failure. In the early days of military flight testing this was known as “screwing the pooch”. If confirmed to the standards of the NTSB, this will be attributed, as they do in almost every aviation incident, to aircrew error.

If the initial findings are eventually confirmed, the aircraft’s designers will probably placard the switch, place a safety catch on it or otherwise try to prevent a repeat of the copilot’s premature but intentional act.